Macarena García-González
Roundtable title: Children’s Literature and Culture Scholarship in/of the Anthropocene: Towards New Bonds and Crossovers
Discussants: Marnie Campagnaro, Macarena García-González, Irena Barbara Kalla, Suzanne van der Beek, Aliona Yarova
Abstract: Over the last twenty years, children’s literature and culture studies has developed a strong orientation towards ecocriticism, ecopedagogy, ecopoetics, animal and plant studies, posthumanism, and new materialism (see e.g. Dobrin and Kidd 2004, Gaard 2008, Echterling 2016; Goga et al. 2018; García-González, Deszcz-Tryhubczak 2020; Oziewicz and Saguisag 2021, Yarova 2021, Campagnaro and Goga 2022, Duckworth and Guanio-Uluru 2022, van der Beek and Lehmann 2022). In this roundtable, a group of international scholars following these approaches in their work on children’s culture share reflections on the field’s current and forthcoming engagements with the Anthropocene (see e.g. Oziewicz et al. 2022) and with the scientific, pedagogical, cultural, and socio-political debates around it. Some of the issues we intend to address include:
– the emergence of the concept of the Anthropocene as radically changing how we think of and research childhood, children, and children’s culture
– children’s culture creators’ responses to the Anthropocene
– practices of learning about the Anthropocene with and from children
– challenges of teaching about the Anthropocene to students of children’s culture, including developing students’ ecoliteracy and fostering their environmental activism
– pressures of the researcher’s/educator’s obligation to propagate hope for a better, post-Anthropocene future (Braidotti 2019).
We believe that this exchange of questions and insights will encourage both ourselves and the audience to consider children’s literature and culture scholarship as an important contribution to interdisciplinary conversations about the Anthropocene. This roundtable is convened under the aegis of the Erasmus Mundus International Master: Children’s Literature, Media & Culture.
Bio: Macarena García-González is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow (2022-2024) at the University of Glasgow with the project “CHILDCULTURES: Challenging Adultism, Anthropocentrism and Other Exclusions with Children’s Literature and Culture”. She was Principal Researcher at the Universidad Católica de Chile, leading the BioSocioCultural Inclusion Research Line of the Centre for Advanced Studies in Educational Justice. She holds a PhD in Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies from the University of Zurich and a MA in Cultural Studies from the Maastricht University. She has authored two monographs—Origin Narratives. The Stories We Tell Children about Immigration and International Adoption (Routledge, 2017) and Enseñando a sentir. Repertorios éticos en la ficción infantil (Metales Pesados, 2021)—as well as several articles and book chapters on children’s literature, culture, education, and epistemologies. She has recently co-edited (with Evelyn Arizpe and Andrea Casals) Campo en Formación. Textos claves para la crítica de literature infantile a juvenil (2023) and (with Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak) Children’s Cultures after Childhood (forthcoming in 2023). She was the convener of the 25th Congress of the International Research Society for Children’s Literature, “Aesthetic and Pedagogic Entanglements”, held in 2021.
